Remembering and Persevering in Rodel Tapaya’s ‘May Tenga Ang Lupa’

2 Aug

The Drawing Room
By Danielle Tamara Fabella

This is a winning entry from the third Art & Market ‘Fresh Take’ writing contest. For the full list of winners and prizes, click here.

For better or worse, news travels swiftly in the Philippines. In a country dubbed the “social media capital of the world”, information spreads like wildfire, more often than not at the cost of reliability. The proliferation of fake news has bred a growing crisis of historical revisionism in the country. When truth is deemed malleable, how can we assure the sanctities of our histories are safeguarded? Who do we turn to tell our stories?

Pondering truth in a post-truth world, Rodel Tapaya looks back upon the stories of myth and legend. In ‘May Tenga Ang Lupa’ (The Land Has Ears) at The Drawing Room in Manila, he unfolds lengthy historical narratives from the perspective of Philippine folklore, taking allusions to mythology and weaving them into hallucinatory visions of an eerily recognizable landscape where the indigenous meets the contemporary. His massive canvases are flowing to the brim with surreal imagery: animalistic creatures, brick walls, cameras, soldiers in gas masks, amalgamations of abstract forms, and distorted figures.

Rodel Tapaya, ‘May Tenga Ang Lupa, May Pakpak Ang Balita’, 2022, acrylic on canvas, 300 x 700cm. Image courtesy of The Drawing Room and Rodel Tapaya.

The exhibit takes its title from the Filipino adage “May tenga ang lupa, may pakpak ang balita” (The land has ears, the news has wings). This refers to the lightning speed at which news can be disseminated. The central painting of the show, titled after the proverb, features a winged humanoid creature with eyes all over its long mane of hair. Peppered across the canvas are symbols of surveillance and flight: different species of birds, floating mouths broadcasting messages, and large ears listening in on them. The winged figure represents Macario Sakay, who fought in the Philippine-American War of the early 1900s and was defamed as a war criminal instead of a hero who fought for Philippine independence. It might be easy and perhaps tempting to get lost in the work’s labyrinthine imagery, yet the figure of Sakay becomes for us an anchor and an entry point into the work. His worried expression mirrors our own as we contemplate a chaotic future where heroes can be discredited on a dime and advocacies labeled treason.

Rodel Tapaya, ‘May Tenga Ang Lupa’, installation view, 2022, organized by The Drawing Room from June 14 to July 9, 2022. Image courtesy of The Drawing Room and Rodel Tapaya.

Through elemental symbols of history and myth, Tapaya taps into the primal narratives that bind us. Within the realm of the mythical, he finds a plane of shared existences that transcend individual and cultural borders. Thus, we can read into his seemingly illogical imagery through two perspectives: what we see and what we recognize. In an acrylic series in black and hazy orange are snapshots of an enigmatic folkloric nature akin to a tarot deck. What we see in ‘Mebuyan’ is the titular goddess of the underworld, with breasts covering her whole body as she nurses babies and monstrous heads. What we recognize is the underlying motif of the woman as the nurturer in any environment. It is notable that this selection of works is the oldest in the show, dating back to 2016. Yet the ideas they narrate take root and remain just as potent. If news travels across a web of connected networks, ideas travel through myth and stories so they may bear fruit across time. Through elemental symbols of history and myth, Tapaya taps into the primal narratives that bind us. Within the realm of the mythical, he finds a plane of shared existences that transcend individual and cultural borders. Thus, we can read into his seemingly illogical imagery through two perspectives: what we see and what we recognize.

“Through elemental symbols of history and myth, Tapaya taps into the primal narratives that bind us. Within the realm of the mythical, he finds a plane of shared existences that transcend individual and cultural borders. Thus, we can read into his seemingly illogical imagery through two perspectives: what we see and what we recognize. ”

Tapaya has studied a broad range of international art styles in addition to his studies in the Philippines. Yet it was when he returned to nature that he found an essence that was truly his own. For it is through elements of nature that we return to the truths that connect us to the earth, no matter how modern our inclinations may be.

Rodel Tapaya, ‘May Tenga Ang Lupa’, installation view, (foreground) ‘Ang Bagyo’, epoxy, sawdust, and metal, 50 cm x 15 x 15 cm. Image courtesy of The Drawing Room and Rodel Tapaya.

In a series of sculptures made from epoxy, sawdust, and metal, Tapaya creates totems that represent aspects of the natural world. All of them bear distinct earlike appendages. In ‘Ang Gubat’ (The Forest), ears branch outward from a tree bark of a head, while ‘Ang Gabi’ (The Night) wears what appears to be a helmet that blocks out all light. The face of ‘Ang Bagyo (The Storm)’ is disfigured and aged. We see through Tapaya’s works that these forces are listening, and they are part of the contemporary realities our voices have constructed.

What, then, do we gain from viewing the chaos of the present through the lens of our native mythos? It would be an oversimplification to read Tapaya’s works as mere outlets of escapist fantasy. What we see in his works is not a depiction of another world, but a reframing of our own, where what we recognize as indigenous to us threatens to be lost in the face of a fragmented global subconscious.

The recent Philippine presidential elections saw Ferdinand Marcos, Jr., win the presidency, marking the return to power of a family responsible for one of the darkest periods of the country’s history: the dictatorship of Ferdinand Marcos. His victory was marked by a wave of trolling and disinformation that sought to revise his family’s bloody history as a golden age of progress. In a country besieged by a collective forgetting, ‘May Tenga Ang Lupa’ is a call to listen to the narratives of our genealogies, for in Tapaya’s words, “Myths and folk tales are our ancestors.” If we are to weather the growing threats of historical revisionism, we have to first protect the histories they are trying so blatantly to erase. Perhaps then, even at a time in our history when falsified truths spreads with the click of a button, it would be the truth of our stories that persevere.

The views and opinions expressed in this article are the author's own and do not necessarily reflect those of A&M or the prize sponsors.

About the Writer

Danielle Tamara Fabella is a freelance writer and artist from the Philippines. She has written for different publications, including Art Plus Magazine, the Cartellino Digest, Mantle Magazine, and Neocha Magazine, along with exhibit texts for gallery shows. As an artist she works in collage, and continues to exhibit her work in the Philippines.